After We Burn Down the Precinct

There’s a lot of ways to answer that. But just to begin with a little background on me: I was politicized in the mid-2000s, first around the anti-Iraq War movement. The older generation of antiglobalization activists weren’t really around then, even though my imagination was shaped by those struggles, and by the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, and also the repression of the Earth Liberation Front activists in the mid-2000s.

From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, I was involved in anti-police and ecological struggles, and anarchist organizing around prison solidarity work. In all of those struggles, insurrectionary thought and insurrectionary anarchism and left communist ideas were influential. But ultimately, I didn’t conceive of the revolution as possible. And so that meant that questions of revolutionary organization or power were not even worth engaging with, because we felt so weak.

You know, when I was first politicized, it was three years into the Iraq War. September 11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars had completely destroyed the antiglobalization movement. It was shattered. And so it was during this very pacifist antiwar movement dominated by reformist groups. Also then we were under Obama neoliberalism. And I think for many years our historical mission was just to reintroduce militancy at all.

And gradually there were moments: there was the Oscar Grant uprising in 2009, there were the anti-austerity university occupations from 2008 to 2010, and then there was Occupy Wall Street in 2011. In all of these moments, and in response to many different police killings, what became our network was mostly focused on trying to carve out space for militancy and reintroducing tactics. And so the black bloc became very important, property destruction became very important. And it was a fight, there was a conflict over the terms of the struggle. We were fighting over what kinds of struggle were permitted. For a long time, that was the limit of our imagination. Like, we want to be able to riot in the way that people in Europe or the rest of the world can riot. And if we can’t do that, we’ll never do anything.

And in the mid-2010s, starting especially with the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri following the police murder of Michael Brown, we started to see, oh, large uprisings against the police are possible. And I think that we played, not a decisive, but a partial role in many struggles, in bringing those tactics back. And so we started to feel our power to some extent, after Ferguson especially, and in response to more police killings after that. Then after the first Trump election in 2016, there was a very large upsurge of energy. Many, many people in the streets. And our tactics and our ideas were suddenly generalizing and becoming more popular and more understandable and legible.

Of course there were a lot of different possibilities and limits and problems during that time. I think that the turn towards antifascism became a problem for us in some ways. Or it wasn’t the horizon that allowed us to do the things we needed to do. In some ways antifascism is actually a liberal framework, because it contains this idea of a unified front, and this celebration of liberal democracy. And so in some ways, in the antifascist struggle, we became foot soldiers for a thing that we didn’t believe in, for the Democratic Party.As much as we tried to bring revolutionary content to it, we couldn’t break out of the frame of liberal democracy. And we know that fascism is just one predictable end of the continuum of capitalist government, it emerges from liberal democracy. So returning to liberal democracy doesn’t actually address it.

Antifascism is also conducive to a type of polarized struggle between two extreme, armed forces. And so there were lots of these conflicts with the far-Right, lots of street fighting. Which I think ultimately strengthened them, because they were able to leverage the optics better than we were, to gain more legitimacy and to cast themselves as victims. But also it turned into the kind of struggles that are hard for normal people to join, because they were so violent. And so those struggles became specialized, like Antifa versus fascists, and everyone has baseball bats, and eventually the guns came out. This is a generalization, there were also many large popular mobilizations against fascists. But this dynamic or danger was always present. And also, I think a lot of us knew this at the time: ultimately the fascists were a distraction from the police. They were a shield. Of course the police protected them also. But the fascists redirected the energy that we had been throwing against the police, they absorbed it and grew from it.

And then 2020 happened. The George Floyd uprising in 2020 so far outstripped anything that I thought was possible in the United States, that most of us thought was possible. That 26 million people could come out into the streets, that we could burn down police stations, that we could actually defeat the police and chase them out, that things like looting and property destruction and mass rioting and communizing goods could become a broad sensibility. You know, even the New York Times was publishing op-eds defending looting and rioting, for a short period of time. So there was a material and discursive swing where we actually went so far beyond what we thought was possible. And to me, that’s when revolutionary politics reentered the picture, and when the vast counterrevolution that had been in process in the US since the early ’70s, which had completely foreclosed the possibility of even thinking about revolution, was broken.

And so then there was this realization,oh, we actually have to take revolution seriously. But we didn’t know what to do with that power, because we hadn’t considered it was possible before. And now we’re in this moment, I think, where some of us are aware of these possibilities. And we’re living through a counterrevolution, because we failed to make a revolution in 2020. We dug our graves by making a revolution only halfway.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that Call was very influential to a lot of people, and it was influential to me when I encountered it. It was a really beautiful text that made me think that things were possible. Because they were also trying to reintroduce revolution, and they were also wrestling with the limits of the antiglobalization movement. But beginning with insurrection. And then The Coming Insurrection was published in 2007, right before the Greek uprising of December 2008, right before the riots that took off when Oscar Grant was killed by the police, right before the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent student occupations. So those texts were very influential.

And I think there’s an interesting parallel in that The Coming Insurrection was written partly in response to the banlieue uprisings in France. Those uprisings had a different history, but maybe were still structurally similar to the racialized anti-police uprisings that happened in the US. So those contradictions produced the possibility of real rupture in France, and then people wrote about that. And I think they deduced some helpful truths about the moment from that experience.

So, we hadn’t personally lived through those uprisings, but the possibility that they were there, that those tensions were there, was very powerful. Because we were still living with this narrative of “the end of history,” you know, Obama was president, neoliberalism was ascendant. We were still living through the end of history, like we’re just in steady state capitalism and Western democracy forever. And so having texts that were demonstrating the ruptures and conflicts within what seemed to be a permanent system was important.

Also there was a lot of theorizing specifically about the black bloc. And that was a legacy carried over from the antiglobalization movement. But there’s a way in which — even though there were black blocs in the US and many people participated in 1999, 2001, 2003 — the historical transmission felt broken as a result of repression, counterinsurgency and so on. And so my generation’s exposure to these ideas and these possibilities came through other countries, through France, Italy, Germany, Greece, South Korea… Because we didn’t have as much connection to our own immediate history. That’s my experience. Other people who were a little bit older had lived through the WTO protests in Seattle, they’d lived through the FTAA protests in Miami. But many of those people kind of disappeared or did their own thing or just weren’t present when I was first becoming politically active.

It’s interesting, I was just going back and reading some old texts, and there was one from 2011 or 2012 that was theorizing the black bloc at that time. And the framing in that text was thinking of the black bloc as a monastic practice trying to keep alive a tradition. So the historical mission was just to bring back militancy. And we were kind of a cult, you know, very small. But we had this discipline that lasts, even if there’s only a few of us. And so there’s a way in which that hypothesis was realized. It was correct in a certain way, because we achieved that.

Yeah, and even before. I think it started to generalize more and more, especially in collaboration with anti-police uprisings after police murders. And so Ferguson was the time that it felt like things were really beginning to break open on a societal level.

No, they don’t give a shit about our boring and tedious practices.

Yeah, and I think that’s really important. And I think that one of the undercurrents of my experience, and for other people that I’ve been thinking and organizing and fighting with for a long time, is trying to retain this critique of politics, this critique of activism, and to look for the real contradictions and the real ruptures, instead of the people who think of themselves as activists. Because the people who think of themselves as activists are often the ones who continue to take over and be the reformists. For example, the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter as an official organization, Al Sharpton, all these figureheads that actually repress the movement. So even though they have theories of social change and they think about politics, and some of them maybe even think about revolution, they’re not the interesting ones. It’s the really marginalized people who have an implicit understanding of property and of the police, much more than middle-class academics, who are the historical force that we should be encountering. If there is a proletariat that’s worth fighting with, it’s them. It’s the fully dispossessed. It’s not thepeople with relatively comfortable positions who think a lot.

And you know, those relationships were really forged in the streets. Because when someone takes their skateboard and smashes a window or spray paints something, there’s only a few options for everyone else. They can either participate and join them, or they can protect them from the police, or they can condemn them, or they can leave them. And if they choose to stay and participate, then there’s a recognition. And suddenly they’re working together.

So a big part of the framework is continuing to show up at these places and to participate on the terms that other people are setting. Which was certainly the case in 2020. It was the case on many different occasions, also during the Oscar Grant rebellion in Oakland in 2009. There was the black bloc and the local kids, and they were the ones breaking and burning police cars and looting.

In 2020, it was actually very multiracial, not just kids of color, like not just racialized youth, but also white youth who were kind of proletarian, or skaters, or just teenagers who for very good reasons were mad at the world they’ve been brought into. And then us. And it was those forces that collaborated to, you know… That’s how the 3rd Police Precinct was burned down in Minneapolis. It wasn’t one force. It was a combination of forces.

Yeah. The street, and the activities that happen there that bring people together. And then another way that these relationships get sustained over time, that our milieu contributes to, is prisoner support. After every wave of anti-police uprisings, there are prisoners. And consistently, it is our friends and comrades who put together support committees, who go visit these people in jail, who raise bail for them, and do this medium or long-term support for people who maybe weren't politicized previously. And that’s the other space of encounter. There are people who are still doing amazing work supporting all of the prisoners from the George Floyd uprising. It’s the streets and the prisons where we encounter each other.

I think the challenge, one of the limits, that was partially experienced during the George Floyd uprising, is that even though we encounter each other in these spaces, we can’t think together and strategize together. We haven’t developed the relationships or the language or the sensibility to think together beyond these moments. Because these are the revolutionaries, these are the people who will be the revolutionaries. The people in the revolutionary parties will not be. These are the forces who are willing to take revolutionary action, who are willing to take risks and who have a material stake in taking those risks and overthrowing everything. The tactics and the force and the power are there. But the horizon is missing, because we can’t talk together about what we would do.

In my mind, that is one of the limits that we reached in 2020. We finally won the battle that we had been fighting, which was to reintroduce militancy and the power of the crowd to American politics. And then the crowds had all this power, but no one knew what to do with it, or no one could articulate it or make a persuasive argument. The only people who were prepared to speak were the reformists and the counterrevolutionaries who turned it into “defund the police” — instead of “materially abolish the police by burning down all the police stations.” They asked for reparations, but reparations in the form of “ask city council to fund something,” instead of “we’re all looting the stores and sharing the wealth and that’s reparations.”

Collective kitchens and free food have been a huge part of all of these uprisings, especially in 2020. And some people have experience setting them up, and then more people join. And then the social experience also becomes an organizing force, of eating together, of having free food.

This raises the question of social reproduction at the site of struggle. There’s overlap here with more land-based, territorial struggles. Because a lot of those skills for developing infrastructure came from either experiences like Occupy, where there’s big encampments, or like Standing Rock, where there’s large numbers of people staying in one place. Which means a need for food, a need for hygiene, a need for some degree of conflict resolution or conflict management — which usually is absent or poorly done, but is a need that still persists. And there’s a need for technical contributions as well. The ability to encapsulate the moment quickly in a few words and circulate some ideas, or to circulate tactics. This is another way in which conscious revolutionaries have played a role in allowing these struggles to grow.

You know, during the uprising in Hong Kong, many people from the US were paying attention, but also many people went there and participated. And during the uprising in Chile, people were paying attention and they participated. And there were all of these new tactical innovations, things like lasers and umbrellas and how to extinguish tear gas. And people intentionally brought that knowledge back and helped to teach it and circulate it. Even before the George Floyd uprising. And then when the uprising started, there were enough people who had these ideas that we could make the knowledge generalize. And that allowed people to become a more substantial force. So there was a tactical escalation and a process of learning from struggles elsewhere.

Yeah, even I feel old, because in some ways, I’m still shaped by becoming politicized during this very depressing time where nothing felt possible. And so I’m always kind of pleasantly surprised when anything happens at all. But for people maybe one cycle of struggles younger than me, who were first politicized during Occupy, their baseline is occupation and rioting. Their baseline expectation is that people can form encampments, feed each other, and fight the police.

And so I think one of our jobs is to help that historical transmission continue, and help hold onto those memories, because there is a through line from these uprisings. But every time we’re in a downturn, people forget it and it’s intentionally erased. Right now, the George Floyd uprising has been completely erased. They’re rewriting history to make everyone forget that 26 million people fought the police in hundreds of cities across the country. First the Democrats and the mainstream media, and now Trump is finishing the job.

But then it comes back. And then people remember.

I think you’re right. And I think that one of the unique limits in the US is the historical erasure and cultural amnesia of all the people who are now considered white. I’ve been born and acculturated into whiteness, along with many of my close comrades and people in my larger networks. And that comes with a number of violent and destructive practices and myths for the planet, but one of them is the idea that whiteness is a default identity without history, it’s the invisible standard measure against which all deviation from the norm is measured. And of course that is a relatively recent fiction, realized through processes of both internal colonization within Europe, and external colonization around the world in the past few hundred years. And within communities that are fully assimilated into whiteness there is very little sense of generational struggle. But within racialized communities, certainly Black and Indigenous populations, you know, people have been fighting for 500 years. And they’ve been, not winning, but persisting, which is itself a form of victory. And so I imagine they have a very different perspective. It’s still urgent, it’s urgent every single day. But it’s a form of resistance to just continue to live and to pass down this knowledge.

And this is something that we have a hard time with in our milieu, because we don’t have a strong sense of generational struggle. Which means that when things are happening, when there’s an uprising, when there’s a moment of rupture, we go all in. And then when there’s a lull, everyone gets depressed. And there’s just a few people trying to maintain the knowledge and maintain the relations until the next time.

Standing Rock was extremely important. And a lot of the beauty and power of Standing Rock has been erased or forgotten now. Certainly, lots of things were lost at Standing Rock. The DAPL pipeline is flowing right now, and it’s leaking oil. So the material win didn’t happen. And there was a lot of infighting and contradictions and repression. But at the same time, it was the largest gathering of Indigenous people in North America in a very, very long time. And certainly the largest conjuncture of Indigenous struggle and other struggles, at the very least since the late ’60s or early ’70s, and possibly much longer.

The encampment is a form of organizing people. The streets, the riot, is one form of organization where people begin to organize together through the actions they’re taking. And the encampment is another form, where the fact of material proximity, the need to defend each other against the police, the need to fight against infrastructure development, the need to sustain life — these things become organizing forces. And so I think Standing Rock was hugely important.

That was one of the things that was interesting about the struggle against Cop City in Atlanta. Because it was a conscious attempt to try to take elements from these two forms of struggle — the anti-infrastructure encampment struggle that’s ecological in nature, and the anti-police uprising — and try to fuse them. And it was extremely effective at doing that in many ways. And it was a very powerful force.

But, it didn’t end up generalizing the way that anti-police uprisings have generalized. Or, you know, it was mainly militants, instead of militants along with other actors. Whereas in 2020, or the Ferguson uprising, or the Oscar Grant rebellion, it was militants and street kids and skateboarders and people who like car culture, or just any and all kinds of people fighting together. And at Standing Rock, it was militants plus all of these different traditions of Indigenous resistance, and lots of other activists. And lots of random people. Standing Rock was interesting because so many random people showed up, because they just sensed that something was important and that their day-to-day lives were meaningless. And it was a place to go and find meaning. This created problems, but it also was interesting, because you need more people than already politicized activists and militants.

I think that the Cop City struggle was hugely impressive. It advanced the struggle in many different ways. Everyone learned a lot. And at the same time, it generated more militants. But it was composed of mostly militants. And so, some new people became politicized, and gained skills. A lot of people across the country gained skills. But it stayed relatively niche, instead of activating larger numbers of people. And I think ultimately, in my opinion, the only thing that could have won that struggle would have been an actual citywide insurrection in Atlanta. It would have taken people toppling the mayor. And that would have required tens of thousands of people. But it never reached that level, as much as people hated the mayor and supported the struggle.

You know, people loved the Cop City struggle. There was a lot of generalized support. You hear stories about being at a bar and the TV is showing the mass arson at the construction site of the police training facility, which took place on March 5th in 2023. And everyone in the bar is cheering the 200 people in camo burning down the construction site. So there was broad popular support for the struggle. But it was still a spectator sport. For whatever reason, there’s lots of different hypotheses, most people didn’t see themselves as protagonists, or they didn’t see the value in participating or think it was worth the risk. Whereas, I think that one of our strengths is that we’re always willing to take risks. Maybe stupidly.

There is, yeah. It’s just that the media landscape has gotten so much stranger since then, with social media and Twitter and Instagram and all of these different platforms. But certainly there are large media outlets that have been very important, like Crimethinc and It’s Going Down. They’ve been instrumental in chronicling these struggles and making them legible. In moments of social upheaval, lots of people look at those sources because they’re the only ones actually explaining it. And then maybe in day-to-day life, it’s just the militants looking at those sites.

Also people have done a lot to build out different social media platforms, Twitter accounts or Instagram accounts, that can communicate. But there’s a problem, which is that all of those platforms are subject to censorship. We’ve experienced so many different platforms getting shut down, banned. There’s a term called shadow-banning, where your account isn’t actually deleted but they change the algorithm so no one sees your posts. And so, because our enemies own all of this infrastructure, they’re never going to let the infrastructure be used to topple them.

Thinking about global connections, this is a lesson from the Arab Spring that the tech overlords, our enemies, have learned. Because the Arab Spring was this moment that everyone thinks of as a technological breakthrough. Twitter was instrumental to turning people out in the streets quickly and communicating horizontally. But that scared all the people in power, and they said, oh, we’ve created this tool that could be used to destroy us. And so we need to make it less effective, and to regulate it and to silence people. Of course the ultimate example of that is Elon Musk buying Twitter to help facilitate Trump’s return to power. So there’s a dialectic, a constant tension or a battle happening on the terrain of communications and media. We’re always trying to find new ways to get messages out, as the old ways get blocked. But it’s very hard.

It’s good, but it’s not easy, and it’s always too much. But it does feel important to me. Because I think that we have to be fighting on every temporality at the same time. We have to fight on the temporality of each day and the temporality of the next uprising, and we have to fight on the temporality of years and decades, even centuries.

For instance, one way that I conceive of things like land projects or communes are as building infrastructure to sustain militants and revolutionaries. There need to be physical places that people can meet. Places that people can come to when they need somewhere to go. And places that are as much as possible outside the economy, or that keep the economy at a distance. There need to be places where people can stay and their reproduction can happen and they don’t have to be working full-time jobs. Because if they’re working full-time in the economy, they can’t fight. And that is by design.

Then there’s the temporality of climate change, and the collapse of food supply chains and food systems, and wanting to build at least part of the bones of some future communal infrastructure that could sustain a locality. And there’s the long-term temporality of relation with the land. And all of those things feel equally important, which is kind of crazy-making because it means I have a hard time prioritizing. I always could be doing something else that’s just as important. If I’m gardening, I could be communicating with people, or writing — it’s all important. But it does feel interesting to try to operate on these multiple temporalities.

And for me, it feels helpful as a way to not be fully paralyzed by the cycles of counterrevolution. Because we have to expect failure. We have to expect repression. We have to know that there will be a beautiful uprising and we’ll get smashed. And that will continue to happen until we have built enough collective power and wisdom to become a force that’s actually capable of confronting the state. This growth happens through fighting. We don’t just organize in the shadows and then all of a sudden emerge and overthrow everything. You have to develop strength through conflict. But it’s hard to sustain over multiple cycles of struggle. And so these different temporalities can help me feel like I’m still engaged in the struggle, even when there’s not an active uprising.

But the contradiction there, the challenging part, is that it takes so much work to sustain the land and to continue to do these long-term projects. And then when an uprising happens, we’re far away from everything. It’s hard to find ways to participate and to support. What do you put on hold? How do you fight? Where do you fight? Do you stay and keep watering the trees so the trees are alive in twenty years? Or do you leave the trees and some of them might die but you go and you fight in the nearest big city? Or do you go to meetings with other people because it’s important to have these ideas circulate, but then you sacrifice your attention to the land? But the different levels of temporality feel really important to me.

It’s interesting, it’s hard to talk about with other people that we live with, or people in the larger area where we live, where there are lots of these different communes or land projects. Because I have a little bit of a grand historical narrative in my mind, that I feel like we’re all participating in. And I see all these different elements as part of that, but it’s hard for me to explain that or to know if other people have that sense. Because I think other people are less connected to the political elements that are happening on the larger scales or longer time frames.

And I think that is also a limit when we’re talking about organization. One of the things that feels most important to me is that there’s a way for people who aren’t full-time revolutionaries, who aren’t willing to sacrifice their lives and do insane shit all the time, to still see the story and to see themselves as protagonists, to feel like they’re part of it and they can identify where things are going. That’s often a thing that I feel is lacking.

I’ll try to outline some of the problematics and bigger themes that have influenced how I think about it. Because I still don’t know what my idea is, I’m trying to work it out. But I’m trying to collect at least a sense of what is necessary.

I think at least two things have been happening over the past ten to fifteen years. One of those things in the US, with connections throughout North America and some connections to the rest of the world, has been the development of some self-consciously pro-revolutionary force, which is kind of like our larger milieu — the network of people who have been fighting, who have been bringing these tactics. And I think, especially since the late 2010s, and then with 2020, we conceived of ourselves as protagonists. We realized,oh, things are possible and we have actually been effective at making a certain number of interventions and participating. And so there’s a collectivity of people who have learned a lot and become skillful at reading historical moments and thinking about interventions, and they’ve developed the kinds of capacities and powers they need to make some of those interventions. And so there’s the formation of a self-consciously pro-revolutionary force, which is small but I think powerful. It’s actually more powerful and more organized than many of the larger political or so-called “revolutionary” organizations in the US. But that organization reached a certain limit, because it’s so informal and it’s based on friendship and it’s very opaque, which is good and has protected us from repression, much more than other organizations. But it also means that spreading and becoming larger is our true limit. So that’s one thing that’s been happening.

I think the other thing that’s been happening on more of a world-historical scale is that humanity has been experimenting with all forms of uprisings over the past fifteen years. Because the world that we live in and the capitalist system that we live in creates misery, it creates wretched, true misery and austerity, it produces genocide. It creates very, very harsh experiences of reality, and then people fight against that. And that always happens. There is always misery and exploitation, and people always fight against it. And people over the past fifteen years have found a level of power that I think they didn’t know that they had. Beginning with the Arab Spring and the Movement of Squares, and there have been major uprisings across the world since then. Spain, Greece, Ukraine, Chile, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, so many places. Rojava, Syria. And in many of these cases, they actually were successful at toppling the existing regime. But they either lacked the force or they lacked the ideas to theorize what could happen next. Which meant that each time, a new government came, or the army took over. Like Sudan. They had an amazing revolution, and the revolution has been repressed by the army and now they’re in a new cycle.

So I think there’s a way in which my experience in the US, of slowly feeling a sense of our own power growing, is a microcosm of what has happened in the world in all these places where people discovered,we can topple a government. We actually can win against the police. But in no place has there been an adequate theory of what to do next. I think partially because we didn’t expect to have that power. And that’s the impasse that we’re at right now, in this last cycle of uprisings, which I think is still partially ongoing in some places, but really was crushed in 2020 by COVID. The governments used COVID very cynically to crush a lot of these uprisings.

So we don’t know what to do, and we need to theorize. We actually need to think about the first measures of the revolution, on a practical level. It becomes a series of very practical questions.How do you defeat the army? How do you defeat the police? How do you prevent the organization of counterrevolutionary forces? But then at the same time, what are the positive programs that can be widely understood by most people who, given the opportunity, would organize themselves to pursue them? Those are questions that we need to begin answering. Because we haven’t had answers, and we didn’t have a hypothesis in 2020. The biggest hypothesis we had was “burn down a second police station.” And if that had happened, things could have been different, also. But we weren’t strong enough after the 3rd Precinct was burned in Minneapolis. We weren’t strong enough against the counterrevolutionary forces of the Left. That was actually what repressed the uprising in the early stages. The recuperative forces of the Left organized everyone into nonviolent demonstrations asking for reforms. And so burning down a second precinct was one hypothesis, but I don’t think that that would have been sufficient on its own. Though it could have unleashed a chain of events that we don’t know what would have happened.

But I think we need to take the question of what happens after the insurrection more seriously, and be able to articulate some of the first steps, and then to think of what kinds of power are necessary to achieve that. You know, there’s an anecdote about Victor Serge, who participated in various phases of the Russian Revolution. He was an anarchist and then later he joined the Bolsheviks. And one of his explanations was that, he was an anarchist, he was involved with the anarchists, he was kind of an anarchist at heart. But his critique of the anarchists was that they didn’t have a true conception of power. They didn’t want power and they didn’t know what to do with it once they had power. And actually, a revolution means engaging on the terrain of power, because there are big, big powers. And certainly we want to depose and decentralize power, but we have to conceive of ourselves as a force. And so I think the question for me is, can we come up with a different answer to that question than Lenin did, or than Victor Serge did by joining the Bolsheviks?

So then that begins to raise the question of revolutionary organization. And not just organization in terms of extending our capacities, and not organization in the formal sense of a group, even. But what are the functions necessary? What is the coordination necessary? How do we deploy force in certain areas and make decisions about deploying force, fighting, not fighting, retreating? All of these things become questions that we need to be able to answer.

Because we’re all already organized, everything is organized. Currently people are organized by capital. And they’re organized by white supremacy. They’re organized by these enemy forces. And this proto-revolutionary milieu is very slightly organized outside of that. I think we have a greater consistency, a plane of consistency, than most people, and this consistency allows some people to insulate themselves slightly from the economy, to spend more of their time fighting and thinking together and less of their time hustling just to survive. It is nowhere near substantial enough, but this level of organization exists. I know that if I go to prison or suffer some injury in the course of struggle, that many people will step in and support me. That is actually a substantial level of security that, I think, far outstrips most Americans’ experience of total precarity.

But this level of organization is actually just too niche and small. The question is how to organize differently to do what needs to be done. And I don’t know what the right way to do that is, but I do think that it requires a lot of different people being able to fight in a lot of different ways, and being able to communicate with each other without subsuming each other into a central force. We need to preserve the diversity of struggles while having relations between different forces, to be able to agree on where we concentrate our forces, or what we do.

And we need to preserve some larger vision of a revolutionary horizon or imagination, that people can understand. Which is a thing that the Right has, they have a revolutionary horizon. They have a series of them, and they’re horrible. And they’re unrealistic. But they’re able to sell those ideas to a number of dispossessed rural people, who are actually the people that we need to be able to speak to. And we can’t speak to them because we don’t have a vision. The limit of our vision is “burn down police stations.”

So there’s an articulation of vision that needs to happen. I think that’s one function. There’s coordination or communication or strategizing. And then there’s development, there’s training new people. Giving people new skills so that we don’t become stagnant. One of my fears is doing what the generation before me did. Because, at least where I was becoming politicized, the older generation of true militants was absent. And we had to kind of learn everything ourselves. I mean, ultimately everyone has to learn everything themselves — but wisdom can be passed down. Because we’ve learned a lot. I think there’s a huge amount of knowledge and wisdom and intelligence in this broader milieu, and we have to be able to communicate that, and open it up and bring people into it and let it be changed by new people. So there has to be growth and transformation, instead of stagnation.

I think that we’re living through a counterrevolution right now. And I think that partly this counterrevolution is targeted, not actually against us, but against the forces of the Left that were more organized, that used our momentum to push for something that wasn’t actually revolutionary.The social-democratic Left, or even the Democratic Party, couldn’t achieve the reforms they were pushing, because they are functionally powerless and confused. And so this counterrevolution is targeting things like nonprofits and diversity, equity, inclusion, and so-called woke culture and language. These are not things we were ever pushing, we always had critiques of those things. So we had the power, but they had the ideas, and they’re now being targeted. They threw up a set of hypotheses to resolve the contradictions that we were pushing, and those hypotheses were inadequate because you can’t win inclusion in capital. Capital can’t sustain giving everyone a fair wage. Capital can’t sustain systematically abolishing white supremacy and patriarchy, because it needs these things.

There’s a way in which the counterrevolution we’re living through now feels like a reprise of the counterrevolution of the 1970s — just worse. The Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement and all of these movements of marginalized identities agitated for inclusion within capital, for fair treatment, for an even slice of the American pie of economic growth. But definitionally, racial capitalism can’t provide fair wages for everyone, especially not during a period of stagnation and decreasing productivity. So in the ’70s we had deregulation, financialization, austerity, eventually Reagan and Thatcher. We had the destruction of the labor movement. And this happened because the demands of the labor movement and the civil rights struggles were too harmful to the profit margins of capitalists, and so they went on the counterattack.

In many ways, the cycle of struggle that led up to 2020 felt similar but accelerated — increasing contradictions, increasing demands for inclusion into a standard of living, violent repression by police forces to handle these surplus populations who could never even truly enter the labor market. And then we had a half-made revolution, and the Left threw up a set of false hypotheses to attempt to resolve these contradictions through DEI — i.e., “diversity, equity and inclusion” — and cultural sensitivity and operations on the level of language and discourse, that never actually addressed the material suffering and the material contradictions. And those hypotheses were disproven, and now we’re living through a counterrevolution against the recuperation.

It’s a very scary counterrevolution. But it also is a counterrevolution that will not be able to address the contradictions that are at play. Because there are major crises that will only worsen. And the right-wing fascist government will not be able to address those contradictions. Their hypotheses are horrible and frightening, and it would be frightening to live in a world where they were true. But I also don’t think their hypotheses are correct, because I don’t think that they can manage the world in the kinds of crisis that it’s in right now, through the kinds of economy and governance that they imagine. Their only real idea is repression, which is ultimately a sign of weakness. It’s not actually adequate. But it is very scary. And it will get much worse. But I don’t think that it can last.

This is not just in the US. There’s this global reactionary turn, which is a counterrevolution against all of these failed revolutions. And so now there’s another extreme. To me, that actually suggests that the conditions are better than we might imagine. Because revolutions unfold in crisis. They aren’t made by revolutionaries. They’re made when the state loses legitimacy because there are larger structural crises at play. So we’re in a moment of ascendant reaction, but I think it’s also a moment that is going to produce the kinds of crises that will throw everything in the system into question, more than anything we’ve experienced in the past. Which means that we have to be an organized force, we have to be able to put forward other hypotheses. Instead of this oscillation, this back and forth pendulum between the left party of capital and the right party of capital.

And we have to actually begin to answer the questions. We can’t answer all of the questions beforehand, because everything is emergent and will emerge through motion. But we have to begin to imagine what answering questions of social reproduction could look like. Because if we can’t answer the questions of how people will eat and have medicine and have relationships that sustain them outside of the economy, then the economy comes back, right? And those are the kinds of questions that I think are really interesting. And urgent.

These experiments happen on small levels during struggles. This is why things like communal kitchens during uprisings are interesting, because they’re positing some other organization of social reproduction in a microcosm. But they still are dependent on a system that is ultimately hostile to us. And so these are questions that to me are just as urgent: how do we eat? How do people feed themselves and have control over their food supplies, when the soil has been destroyed, when people’s relation to the land has been destroyed, when the food that they get comes on trucks from hundreds or thousands of miles away? If we don’t want those things to continue, then we have to start real experiments with other forms.

You know, in my opinion, we were all extremely lost in philosophy and theory for a long time. And that was good in a certain way, I learned some things. And it’s a good thing to do when you don’t have any power and you can’t do anything. But when real practical questions emerge, we need to be able to pivot to answering and experimenting with those questions. It’s interesting because this notion of destituent power was very influential to me, very beautiful. There was a moment where people thought, this is the thing. This is how we escape the cycle of revolution and reaction. But people don’t talk about it much anymore. I probably should go back and read Marcello Tari again, because some of it feels important. But Tari doesn’t answer the question, how do we organize social reproduction?

But of course it’s complex, because destituent power as a concept really first emerged in the 2001 anti-austerity uprisings in Argentina, and was really deeply tied to questions of social reproduction. So as always there’s a dialectical process — new ideas are created in the course of a struggle, they evolve and take on different meanings in different contexts, they become formal abstractions and academic debates, and it’s up to us to grab them and bring them back down to earth, literally to re-embed these ideas in the real contexts of real places.

The question of territoriality is extremely important. I think that our struggles have to be rooted in location. And I think that trying to address practical matters helps that happen. Capital organizes everything on a smooth plane of equivalence. Everything is the same, it’s floating, the world is completely flat. This is the abolition of space by time. And that is also what money is. The general equivalence of everything, everything is exchangeable. And that is a totalizing system, which is also a lie. It’s not true. It is an ideology that has violent consequences. But actually, there are real physical places,and they have different weather, and different soil, and different plant lives, and different ways that humans live. There’s a veneer of equivalency and exchange overlaid on top of an extremely uneven and complex planet filled with different ways of being. And in moments of crisis — war, ecological crisis, logistical hiccups — we remember that we live in places. Absent the world market our lives are actually extremely constrained by the shape of our local ecologies. So I think ideas of revolution or communism that are totalizing can become a mirror of capitalist universalism. People think, we can just turn the global industrial system into a communist global industrial system. And everything will be the same except that people have what they need for free. That’s a false idea.

At the same time, I don’t think that a revolution can be only local. We know this. We know this from the Paris Commune. The Paris Commune was crushed because it couldn’t spread. And because there wasn’t enough power in enough other places. And so all of capital, all of European capital said, we can’t allow that to continue. All the European monarchies said, we can’t allow that to continue. The Russian Revolution was the same. It was a revolution in one place. And you know, there are lots of different hypotheses from different perspectives on why it was bad or why it failed. But the ones that focus just on the ideology of Lenin are missing the point that the entire capitalist world arrayed itself to destroy the revolution. To marginalize them and to suppress their economy.

So those are real questions that we have to answer. And they are being raised today also with Rojava. Rojava has only been able to kind of survive because it’s able to pit these different imperialist powers against each other. Pit the US against Turkey, get US resources to fight ISIS. Even though they don’t believe in US imperialism, they actually collaborate with the US and maintain an alliance to fight against ISIS, because that’s a way that they carve out some degree of freedom. Some, but it’s insufficient. And of course with the collapse of the Assad regime and the changing balance of forces with Syria, they are even more threatened now.

So we can’t have just a local revolution. And the vision of autarky, of purely localizing, that everything can be self-sufficient and autonomous within a small area, this is wrong. This is also a false idea of the past that has been given to us by capital and by the ideologues of capital. Because people have always been traveling and circulating. This is one of the things that Indigenous people know, and that we learn from them: the vast distances that people had relations across, thousands and thousands of miles. This is also something that David Graeber taught us. He wrote about the amount of circulation across the world before states and empires were formed. And in some ways, these states and these empires were actually smaller and less ambitious. They were an enclosure of human life, a reduction in the scale and complexity of relationships, not an expansion.

And territoriality is important because it’s a way to be connected to the material world, instead of the ideological world of capital and social media and AI, which is very paralyzing. It’s paralyzing to try to do the revolution on the internet. It’s just discourse. But there are still plants. There are still people. We live in places, we eat food. These material questions are important. So territoriality is important.

But we have to be able to build up enough strength in enough places, and have relations and circulation between those places. Because any revolution will be uneven. There will be a breakthrough in one place and then another. Maybe in several hundred years, people will look back and they’ll say the revolution began in Chiapas in 1994 and then it spread to Rojava in 2012. Graeber said that we would look back on the Greek insurrection of 2008 as the beginning of the global revolution, and he might still be right. So I think we have to see what has already happened as part of it. But we have to have enough strength that when there are more breakthroughs, they can be defended by people elsewhere. And we have to have enough connections so that they can’t be isolated.

Those connections have to include ideas, but not only ideas. The ideas are very important because that’s how we keep the memory alive and how we communicate what’s happening. But the connections also have to be material, food and weapons and the goods that people need to survive, because we all are in this larger web. And so we have to organize social reproduction. And we have to organize the relationships across time or space that allow social reproduction to take place outside of the ways in which exchange is currently created by the market.

That’s why the US is so important. Because it is the largest military force that’s able to smash revolutions. Through economic might and manipulation and military domination, it’s able to concentrate its force any time there’s a breakthrough in the world. There are all kinds of critiques of Third World revolutions in the 20th century, but also it’s important to recognize the fact that those revolutions took place in the context of trying to survive in competition with the US. And so it’s only through destroying the US that there will be a chance. And I think we may see that. I think we’re witnessing the accelerating decline of the US empire.

Amidst all of this, AI also is becoming this truly horrible apotheosis of capital. If capital is this value-form which just has to keep growing, and which creates totally irrational activities that no one would choose because of the internal dynamics of accumulation that it needs, in pure pursuit of value and growth, then AI feels in some way like the apotheosis of that logic. It’s churning up the surface of the Earth in order to perpetuate itself, in order to grow. But still, I don’t think that AI can actually conceive of the material world. It can’t understand a mountain or a forest or a riot. It could just understand these representations. And so we have to remember the material world, that is actually where we fight.

You know, they want us to be looking at these devices all the time, and then to feel powerless. They literally steal our agency from us, because we turn it over to the AI that destroys the material world, while creating something virtual. We need to be in places, with each other, experiencing the specificity of where we are on the planet and of our own power to act together.

I think they are. And I think that’s a thing that the liberal establishment either consciously chooses to ignore, or doesn’t understand, because they think that what’s happening is irrational. They think that Trump is crazy, that the right wing is crazy and they’re just doing crazy things because they’re xenophobic. And they are xenophobic, but they also are doing very smart things, because they actually understand better than the liberal establishment where power is and where resistance comes from.

And they see that universities have always been sites of social contestation. This is where young people are concentrated and learn things and become a force. That was true throughout the 2000s, it was true in the ’60s, it was certainly true during the recent Palestine solidarity student movement. And universities are also how ideas and people travel and communicate. You know, Trump talks about immigrants, drug dealers, criminals coming to the US, but I think that at least his advisors understand that revolutionary ideas travel through the circuits of students moving between universities. We have all of these immigrants who come from Palestine, who come from Lebanon, who lived through the Sudanese uprising, who understand the empire, and they bring lessons with them. And our enemies are trying to cut those flows off so that we can’t learn. That is a conscious and intentional choice. So then travel becomes really important. We have to circulate, revolutionaries have to travel.

Yes. We have to tend these connections. We have to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and solidarity across the planet. And we can only really do that through relationships, through getting to know each other and understanding our shared stakes.